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Throne of the Caesars: Fire and Sword by Harry Sidebottom

Fire and Sword is the concluding novel of the Throne of the Caesars trilogy – although as I felt compelled to google the historical narratives of its real life characters afterwards, I hope author Harry Sidebottom might one day get around to writing sequels, if only in short story form. I loved the short stories he’s written to “bridge” the second part, Blood and Steel, and this third novel; the short stories are currently only available online, so if further short stories are added perhaps there’ll be enough for a hard copy volume.

As you’d expect from Sidebottom, an Oxford academic who specializes in ancient warfare and the Hellenistic influence within the Roman Empire, Fire and Sword is a riveting reconstruction of 3rd century Rome. Unobtrusively yet authoritatively, extensive research serves as the foundation for all depictions here of locations (terrains and town layouts), garments, foods, transport, historical personalities, politics and characters’ worldviews. But the trilogy is an epic of imagination, too: records of the politics and political players in this drama are unreliable and incomplete, so Sidebottom has to a large extent extrapolated personalities and inferred backroom events from scant sources.

The characters he’s `created’ are engaging, although it did take me a little while to reorient myself to who is whom and where we were in terms of where the plot picks up from the previous books and stories. The plot moves fast, much faster than in the first novel Iron and Rust. I was a little worried by the introduction of a caped bandit king early on, who I suspected might prefigure a bodice-ripper subplot, and I hope it’s not a spoiler to say Sidebottom, thankfully, had other purposes for this character.

As well as concluding the Throne of the Caesars trilogy, Fire and Sword is a kind of prequel to Harry Sidebottom’s popular Warrior of Rome series, and introduces Warrior of Rome’s main character, the Saxon hostage prince Dernhelm a.k.a Marcus Clodius Ballista. Even as a young teenager Dernhelm’s thought processes are recognizably those of his adult self as readers have come to know him through the six novels so far in the Warrior of Rome series. Sidebottom has more Ballista novels planned, and readers who love Ballista and his familia, his close cohort, will welcome both Dernhelm’s appearance in Fire and Sword and also future tales of his travels and travails 25 years later.

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Worked in the Australian rock music industry as a journalist and published widely as a poet before moving to London and spending the better part of a decade in advertising agencies. Returned to Australia and tried teaching, primarily teaching English to non-English speaking, newly-arrived refugees but also briefly as a high school classroom teacher. Has travelled Western Europe, North Africa, Russia, Northern India, East Asia, coastal USA, some Pacific Islands, and Australia.